make it sing

Poet, take pains to make it sing.

admired if not loved

Alexander Pope is not a poet one loves. But Pope lives on by quotable verse that sings and stings.

make a great noise

“Romanticism is the fear of looking truth in the eyes,” [Tolstoi] said last night, speaking of Balmont’s poems. Suler did not agree with him, and read some of them with great feeling, lisping in his agitation.

“That’s not poetry, Lyovushka, it’s charlatanism, nonsense, mere senseless word-spinning. Poetry is artless. When Fet wrote:
     What I will sing, I know not,
     But my song will swell within me,
he expressed the true feeling of the people about poetry. The muhzik, too, knows not what he sings; he just sings oh! and ah! and ai-da-mi! and out comes a true song, straight from the soul, as the bird sings. Your new poets do nothing but invent.

[...]

Going through the mail:
“They make a great noise, they write, and when I die—they’ll say a year after: ‘Tolstoi? Wasn’t that the Count who went in for shoe-making, and then something or other happened to him?’”

—quoted from “Lev Tolstoi,” a series of remembrances by Gorky, in Maxime Gorky: On Literature (U. of Washington Press, 1973).

just sing

Let there be singing…singing will always aid one’s poetry.

unaugmented text

Whether sung or scripted in calligraphy, nothing could raise this array of words to the level of poetry.

given to song

The poetry of Japan takes the human heart as seed and flourishes in the countless leaves of words. Because human beings possess interests of so many kinds, it is in poetry that they give expression to the meditations of their hearts in terms of the sights appearing before their eyes and the sounds coming to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog that lives in the waters—is there any living thing not given to song? It is poetry which, without exertion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women, calms the hearts of fierce warriors.

—Ki no Tsurayuki (868-945), the preface to Kokinshū
(quoted in The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, Princeton Univ. Press, 1985)

complete equipment

The poet is a rebuilder of the imagination…And he is not a complete poet if his whole imagination is not attuned and his whole experience composed into a single symphony.

For his complete equipment, then, it is necessary, in the first place, that he sing; that his voice be pure and well pitched, and that his numbers flow; then, at a higher stage, his images must fit with one another; he must be euphuistic, coloring his thoughts with many reflected lights of memory and suggestion, so that their harmony may be rich and profound; again, at a higher stage, he must be sensuous and free, that is, he must build up his world with the primary elements of experience, not with conventions of common sense or intelligence; he must draw the whole soul into his harmonies, even if in doing so he disintegrates the partial systemizations of experience made by abstract science in the categories of prose.

—George Santayana, “The Elements and Functions of Poetry,” Aesthetics and the Arts (McGraw-Hill, 1968), edited by Lee A Jacobus

singing in between

In the lyric even the interstices sing.